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Running a game

The lived loop of an actual session — before, during, and after — from the DM's seat, with what players do alongside.

The dashboard is home base

Opening a campaign lands you on the dashboard, which gathers everything at a glance: the status header (session number, danger level, current location), the world map, the quest board, the party (with HP bars), NPCs, the session log, a dice widget, and your notes. A Live · Round N chip appears here whenever an encounter is running, linking straight into it.

Before the session — prep

Prep is just building world entities ahead of time (see Quests, NPCs & the world):

  • Draft the quests you expect to come up, with objectives and DM secrets.
  • Line up NPCs with dispositions and hidden motives.
  • Place the session's locations on the map.
  • Optionally build an encounter in advance — create it, add monsters from the compendium, and leave it in the Preparing state until the fight starts (see Combat).
  • Jot plans in DM-shared or private notes — these are your backstage.

During the session — at the table

  • Narrate and update as you go. Reveal locations (discovery status), flip quest statuses, tick objectives, edit NPC dispositions as relationships change.
  • Run fights on the run-session screen — initiative, turns, damage, conditions, with HP writing back to character sheets when the encounter ends.
  • Roll dice from the dashboard widget or inside combat; players roll their own, and everyone sees the same shared roll feed. Notation supports keep/drop — 2d20kh1 for advantage, 2d20kl1 for disadvantage, 4d6dl1 for stat rolls — and you can attach a DC and a label so the log records the check and whether it succeeded.
  • Players drive their own characters — HP, conditions, ticking objectives — and keep notes. What they can't touch is DM canon or anyone else's character.
  • Danger level lives in the DM's status-header edit form, so it changes deliberately, not by accident.

Players on their own devices see updates shortly after you make them. Combat updates push instantly (the run-session screen and player display stream live), and the other shared surfaces — dashboard, quest board, party HP, and notes — refresh on a ~5s poll while the tab is open. Backgrounded tabs pause polling to spare the server, then catch up the moment you switch back.

After the session — the recap

  1. Write the recap. Open Sessions → Add recap (auto-numbered) and summarise what happened — or connect an AI and ask it to draft one (see Connect an AI). You can also record attendance — which characters actually played that session.
  2. Sweep the scribe inbox. Players drop quick notes during play; resolve them into quests, NPCs, and updates (see Notes & the scribe inbox).
  3. Review proposals. If an AI or a player proposed canon changes, approve or reject them from Proposals.

Between sessions

Players log in to reread recaps and shared notes and to keep planning their characters. As DM you keep prepping the next beats — sketch where the story might fork on the Storylines arc/beat planner and record in-world dates on the Timeline (see Quests, NPCs & the world). Absent players get caught up by notifications (recap posted, next session) and a read-only recap share link you can send them.

XP & levelling up

After an encounter or a session, award XP from the Party page (✦ Award XP, DM only — every character gets the amount) or from a character sheet's Experience card (owner or DM, any amount, even negative to fix a mistake). The sheet shows progress toward the next D&D 5e threshold and flags the character when the XP qualifies for the next level.

When it's time to level, hit ⬆ Level up on the sheet's Experience card: it bumps the level by one and asks for the new max HP — the hit points gained are added to current HP too, so damage taken carries over. The flow is deliberately not gated on XP, so milestone campaigns can level whenever the story says so. The Edit form still exposes raw level/XP/HP max as an escape hatch.